You say you wanna a
revolution? Well, you know - or readers of a certain age
will know - that even beloved old reactionary Walt
Disney was a passionate fan of revolutionaries, if they
were of the right lily white breed. Exhibit A is the
stirring 1950s Disney TV series 'Johnny Tremain,'
chronicling a handsome and dashing young minute man's
adventures during the early days of the American
Revolutionary War. Yet another Disneyfied Revolutionary
War TV series, 'Swamp Fox,' celebrated Francis Marion's
legendary hit-and-run exploits in South Carolina while
the infinitely evil British Colonel Tarleton (a villain
reprised with relish in Mel Gibson's The Patriot) stayed
hot on his elusive heels. Even the TV theme lyrics – hum
along - were, for the grim McCarthyite era, kind of
kickass: "Swamp Fox, Swamp Fox, Tail on his hat, Nobody
Knows where the Swamp Fox is at. Swamp Fox, Swamp Fox,
Hides in the Glen. He runs away to fight again."
Sensible guy.

‘Hit
and run’ is what you do if you are sane and up against a
vastly superior military force. Maybe the Viet Cong
watched Disney reruns? So our autistic American pop
culture really isn't ignorant of the concept of
justified guerrilla resistance to a tyrannical
government or foreign occupier. True, driving out the
redcoats did not do much at the time for the status of
Blacks, women, native Americans, or poor whites, as
Howard Zinn and other glum historians remind us, but
nothing's perfect. Again, at the pre-Contra height of
Reagan's era an awesomely preposterous film Red Dawn
(1985) portrayed a successful invasion of the USA by
robotic Soviet airborne troops and sniveling Cuban
sidekicks, and it imagined how a rag-tag band of angry
teens responded to their oppressive occupation.

In a
rip-snorting all-American fantasy fest, scripted by
uber-rightwinger John Milius, our juvenile commandos
commence putting to shame the comparatively pallid
antics of Castro in the Sierra Madres, Tito in mountain
fastnesses of Yugoslavia, Ho Chi Minh and General Giap
in steaming Vietnam jungles, or Mao anywhere in China.
What do the resourceful young Yanks get up to? Why they
strike at enemy weak points, hit key vulnerable
installations, assassinate enemy leaders, pick off
stragglers, rub out informers (and anyone suspected of
informing), and even plant a few concealed IEDs here and
there. They play dirty simply because they have to. Had
Red Dawn bothered to caricature standard TV newscasts
audiences would have watched purse-lipped anchors primly
proclaiming that outside agitators were inciting trouble
among an otherwise contented American people. (V for
Vendetta delightfully conjures a mad lapdog Bill O'
Reilly clone.) So far as armed resistance goes, it's
perfectly okay when Yanks do it. No one else - or not if
they are not serving the interests of big US investors.
Red Dawn swirled with more unintended incendiary ironies
than the average White Hiouse press conference contains
these days

But
ironies are unusually scarce in the intriguing hit film
V for Vendetta, a rancorous ‘lefty’ graphic novel made
cinematic flesh. A decade into our – what else? - dire
future a Blade Runner Britain labors under the bleakest
Orwellian conditions after a neofascist 'High
Chancellor' (John Hurt, who brings eerie echoes of
turnabout from his 1980s movie role as Winston Smith)
and his henchmen exploit terrorist attacks of unknown
origin so as to seize total power. It’s resonant, all
right. Everything that happens is merely grist for
cynical power-seeekers, and always was, and always will
be. The United States, by the way, is embroiled in
ferocious civil war, though between whom exactly we
don't know. The grim globe is afflicted as always by
spreading plagues, poverty and violence. Ordinary decent
Brits, puzzled and placid, comply with brutal police
state codes for the sake of what is trumpeted to be the
common good or the national interest, or some other
mind-numbing deceitful abstraction. Step out of line and
you either are snuffed straightaway or else wind up a
quivering specimen in secret human experimental labs
jointly run by the government and its even more vicious
corporations who helped to create the foul regime, which
is in their pockets, in the first place. Familiar?

Fear
not. Into this cruel wasteland boldly strides a
swashbuckling Guy Fawkes-masked champion in swirling
black cape, a man dedicated to demolishing the Orwellian
regime. The subversive saga mixmasters '1984', the
Bionic Man series, Terry Gilliam's Brazil, and the
treacly melodrama of The Count of Monte Cristo into a
smart commercial blend. Guy Fawkes, incidentally, is a
fascinatingly ambivalent character in British history -
either a religious malcontent or a civic hero who in
1605 lent a hand to the bungled ‘gunpowder plot’ to blow
up the House of Lords, which wasn’t much of a democratic
institution at the time. (The plotters weren’t champions
of democracy either.) Poor Fawkes, who wasn’t even the
mastermind, was nabbed, tortured and hideously
executed, a la Braveheart. It's difficult today for an
innocent observer to tell whether the annual Guy Fawkes
Day celebrations on November 5th are cheering the rescue
of the Crown or a damn nice try by Fawkes, who recently
was named among the 100 greatest Britons in a BBC poll,
alongside such benefactors of mankind as David Bowie and
Princess Diana.

V,
sporting a bulletproof rictus grin mask, is a
biologically enhanced escapee from a punitive government
detention center that is half Abu Graib and half Dachau
medical atrocity camp. Somehow, the vengeful V has
amassed apparently unlimited resources stored in an
underground bat cave decked out with a screamingly hip
blend of high and low art, a juke box chock full of
syrupy 1940s crooner standbys, and a flashy armory
capable of derailing the best-laid plans of conceited
authorities. The regime cabal comes treacherously
replete with an unmistakable slimy Dick Cheney stand-in
who really pulls all the strings of the splenetic
unstable supreme leader. A lecherous lout of a Bishop is
pleased to lend the Church's clammy hand to the maniacal
agenda of the authoritarian clique.

Plunked
into this grand guignol narrative is a somber high level
cop (Stephen Rea, deploying his signature hangdog
features and a shabby Columbo demeanor to good effect))
just doing his job pursuing wicked outlaws, as
arbitrarily designated by what he suspects are
thoroughly unlawful bosses. The diligent cop, oddly, is
one of very few characters who exhibit qualms or even
smidgen of ethics. His quarry, apart from V, is Evey
(Natalie Portman), the daughter of 'disappeared'
dissident parents, who nonetheless contrives to remain
implausibly naïve, not to say, obtusely thick about the
nature of the regime and its role in making her however
fetching an orphan. Eleven out of ten such tragic
offspring, one imagines, would more likely be utterly
obsessed with tracking down the true culprits.

Evey is
a four-star terminal slacker, just trying to scuffle
along in as low key a life as possible. A young audience
clearly is intended to be enticed by this annoying
device of pseudo-humility so as to identify with a very
pretty, if disappointingly dimwitted, heroine. One
supposes this listless stance is what the wiseass
filmmakers view as the default mode of the average
citizen: a self-induced state of cluelessness. (One
can't help recalling the post-2004 election bitterness
of 'blue state" denizens toward 'red states' electing
Bush's imbecilic administration - and, in doing so,
discounting media propaganda, dirty tricks, and easily
hacked electronic voting machines.) If so, then V's
infantile adventurism might make an iota of sense, and
blowing landmark buildings to colorful smithereen will
come off as really cool. Finally, puffy middle-aged
Stephen Fry plays a gay TV variety show host who is
unwilling to endanger his high life style in order to
blurt what he really thinks about the malevolent and
petty rulers. Everybody just wants to fit in, sort of
like in, you know, Vichy France.

The
queasy screen universe depicted in V for Vendetta is one
of a people utterly depleted in spirit and courage
through a stringently state-engineered atmosphere of
fear and loathing. How did society come to this pretty
pass? Well, a band of Islamic zealots are held
officially responsible for gruesome terrorist acts. The
Koran consequently is banned as incendiary reading
matter (and in the Britain today it is certainly no fun
to be a young Muslim man). The United Kingdom regime
wallows, almost smugly, in its permanent state of peril.
A perpetual state of emergency awards conniving
authorities and their corporate sponsors free reign.
Terrorism is the answer to every authoritarian’s prayer.

Shades
of Halliburton, a very well-connected mega-business
backs the Cheneyesque vice-chancellor and, whether by
accident or intention, inflicts the first domestic
fatalities, a sour circumstance reminiscent of the
forgotten anthrax attacks after 9/11 whose source US
authorities seem so unwilling to locate or disclose.
Muslim are the patsies. Anyone raising so much as a peep
about civil liberties is snared by riot-geared thought
police, and whisked off into Japanese 'Unit 731'-style
biological warfare experiment stations where, in a
mishap the cop uncovers, all but one subject dies. (A
single doctor - just one - feels guilty about it.) The
escaped survivor turns out to have been a prodigious
biological success, emerging as the stronger, fleeter,
and - must be testosterone enhancement - romantic
revolutionary known as V, a dazzling martial arts
aficionado who disembowels bewildered police squads in
seconds flat. Mercifully, he performs no flying trapeze
tricks.

V's
ripe first speech is, according to taste, either a
dazzling tour de force or a tediously alliterative
manifesto delivered just after he rescues little Evey
from the lascivious clutches of the secret police. Evey
is suitably grateful but also strangely reluctant, given
that she's a marked woman anyway, to take up arms with
him against malicious authorities. By contrast, the gay
Stephen Fry character, and a beautiful pair of lesbian
lovers, are, in a militantly anti-gay society provided
with a gender preference-based motive for resistance.
All that’s missing is pink triangles. Eventually, even
the prudently pusillanimous Fry character, the
broadcaster, pokes deeply barbed fun publicly at the
High Chancellor, and pays dearly for it.

But
Evey, alas, herself sorely needs consciousness-raising,
an awakening -and V put her through an induced psychotic
experience in order to achieve it. She clearly is a
stand-in for the masses - a word I shudder at - who
likewise need a miracle worker vanguard to show them the
truth and the way. With the slightest of mental twists
this haunted golden-tongued man V with shiny mask and
billowing cape transmutes into the flinty taciturn
hombre in dusty cowboy hat and poncho - a Clint Eastwood
vigilante wraith smashing the rotten old order to
restore justice, and to balance his personal account.
This shadowy mirroring of modern Britain and America is,
I suppose, the best that commercial film makers can get
away with, so more power to the Matrix-generating
Wachowskis for their calculated audacity.

The
Wachowskis rabidly invest every action scene they
concoct with slo-mo whirling stab marks - wispy laser
trails hanging in the air so audiences can relish the
trajectory of killing blows to each sniveling or
sneering creep. That's the tiresome part. The sly
message in a mass market film that the world is
smothered in corrupt corporate bullshit abetted by
faithful state underlings, with Jack Abramof-like
middlemen sealing the deals, may be boring too but it is
encouraging. As in Samuel Johnson's remark, it is not
that the dog danced well, the remarkable thing is that
the dog danced at all. V is for Vendetta, to give it
credit, does play around with the notion of legitimacy,
suggesting how terribly dependent elites really are upon
willing compliance of the hoi polloi. Withdrawing
compliance, as counseled from Aristophanes through
Gandhi and Martin Luther King, is surely one way to
undercut or even overthrow lunatic hubristic elites.

Is this
any way to run a revolution? Judging by V For Vendetta’s
box office success, it's the half-assed thought that
counts. Audiences 'get it' insofar as the film is a
warning of the ugly places our leaders are dragging us
into. The final sequence of a jamboree of thousands of
Fawkes-attired citizens storming Parliament, Winter
palace style, may well be a memorable pop culture visual
moment, but the political awakening behind this frilly
uprising isn't at all apparent. Ultimately, as the story
line demands, the citizenry, cowed into acceptance of
their monitored lot, require a catalytic spark from a
maverick superhero to smash the tissue of lies which the
state, like all states, assiduously wrapped around them.
It's revolution, Jim, but not as we know it. – graphic
novel style.

The
film’s climactic swarming of the solemn, costumed crowd
over heavily armed troops is as dangerously dubious a
scene as the Wachowskis ever dreamed up. British troops
- witness Bloody Sunday 1972, for one – always have been
willing to kill UK citizens in Northern Ireland without
hesitation or remorse. Our daring film makers most
likely had the 1989 transitions, especially in Romania,
in mind. While, say, Romanian troops in 1989 may have
decided not to massacre crowds, Chinese soldiers at
Tianneman square performed all too obediently. The film
makers, going for surreal sensationalism at all costs,
fall headlong into a standard narrative cinematic trap
that works to extinguish any truly radical notions. Such
as the historical inkling that perhaps people are able
to organize themselves, and would be better off without
any distractingly charismatic leaders around to show
them the way.

Kurt Jacobsen
is a research associate in Political
Science at the University of Chicago and the book review
editor at Logos. His latest books include Maverick
Voices: Conversations with Political and Cultural Rebels
(Rowman & Littlefield, 2004) and, co-edited,
Experiencing the State (Oxford University Press, 2006.)